Elasticity Optimism

By Jean Imbs and Isabelle Mejean

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

On average, estimates of trade elasticities are smaller in aggregate data than at sector level. This is an artifact of aggregation. Estimations performed on aggregate data constrain sector elasticities to homogeneity, which creates a heterogeneity bias. T...

The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family

By Claudia Goldin

American Economic Review, May 2006

An Interview with William J. Baumol

By Alan B. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2001

Fiscal Externalities and Optimal Unemployment Insurance

By Nicholas Lawson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

A common finding of the optimal unemployment insurance (UI) literature is that the optimal replacement rate is around 50 percent; however, a key assumption is that UI is the only government spending activity. I show that optimal UI levels may be dramatica...

Relative Income, Happiness, and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles

By Andrew E. Clark, Paul Frijters, and Michael A. Shields

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2008

The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individ...

The Changing Role of Government in Financing Health Care: An International Perspective

By Mark Stabile and Sarah Thomson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to elucidate the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, ...

Estate Taxation with Altruism Heterogeneity

By Emmanuel Farhi and Iván Werning

American Economic Review, May 2013

We develop a theory of optimal estate taxation in a model where bequest inequality is driven by differences in parental altruism. We show that a wide range of results are possible, from positive taxes to subsidies. The results depend on redistributive obj...

Preemption Games: Theory and Experiment

By Steven T. Anderson, Daniel Friedman, and Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, September 2010

Several impatient investors with private costs Ci face an indivisible irreversible investment opportunity whose value V is governed by geometric Brownian motion. The first investor i to seize the opportunity receives ...

Teaching Statistics and Econometrics to Undergraduates

By William E. Becker and William H. Greene

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

Traditionally econometrics and economics statistics have been taught in the theory and proof, chalk and talk mode commonly found in the teaching of mathematics. We advance the use of computer technology in the teaching of quantitative methods to get stude...

Quantile Regression

[Symposium: Econometric Tools]

By Roger Koenker and Kevin F. Hallock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

Quantile regression, as introduced by Koenker and Bassett (1978), may be viewed as an extension of classical least squares estimation of conditional mean models to the estimation of an ensemble of models for several conditional quantile functions. The cen...

Intertemporal Depletion of Resource Sites by Spatially Distributed Users

By Gerard Gaudet, Michel Moreaux, and Stephen W. Salant

American Economic Review, September 2001

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009

The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

By Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, July 2016

This paper links the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment after 2000 to a change in US trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries more exposed to the change experience greater employment loss, increased imp...

Decoupling and Recoupling

By Anton Korinek, Agustin Roitman, and Carlos A. Végh

American Economic Review, May 2010

Do Output Contractions Cause Investment in Fiscal Capacity?

By Christian Gillitzer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This paper shows that an economic slump can induce a government to invest in fiscal capacity. Large negative income shocks stress the revenue-raising capability of narrow tax bases, making an increase in tax base breadth desirable relative to its fixed im...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

Coarse Competitive Equilibrium and Extreme Prices

By Faruk Gul, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, and Tomasz Strzalecki

American Economic Review, January 2017

We introduce a notion of coarse competitive equilibrium, to study agents' inability to tailor their consumption to prices. Our goal is to incorporate limited cognitive ability (in particular limited attention, memory, and complexity) into the analysis of ...

Rules and Authorities in International Monetary Arrangements: The Role of the Central Bank

By Robert Z. Aliber

American Economic Review, May 2000

Risk, Delay, and Convex Self-Control Costs

By Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2011

We develop a dual-self model of self-control that is compatible with modern dynamic macroeconomic theory and evidence. We show that a convex cost of self-control explains a wide range of behavioral anomalies concerning risk, including the Allais paradox,...

Intermediation Reduces Punishment (and Reward)

By Lucas C. Coffman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2011

This paper shows moral decision making is not well predicted by the overall fairness of an act but rather by the fairness of the consequences that follow directly. In laboratory experiments, third-party punishment for keeping money from a poorer player de...